A movement to revolutionize the treatment of trauma patients in the U.S. can be traced to an infamous battle fought in East Africa more than 30 years ago.
Eric Bank, Assistant Chief of EMS for Harris county Emergency Services District 48, demonstrates how blood and plasma can be administered in a properly equipped ambulance, that carries whole blood onboard.
Dr. John Holcomb and Eric Bank with Harris County Emergency Services demonstrate how blood and plasma can be administered in a properly equipped ambulance.
Enlarge/ The RetroArch app installed in tvOS. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Apple’s initial pitch for the tvOS and the Apple TV as it currently exists was centered around apps. No longer a mere streaming box, the Apple TV would also be a destination for general-purpose software and games, piggybacking off of the iPhone's vibrant app and game library.
That never really panned out, and the Apple TV is still mostly a box for streaming TV shows and movies. But the same App Store rule change that recently allowed Delta, PPSSPP, and other retro console emulators onto the iPhone and iPad could also make the Apple TV appeal to people who want a small, efficient, no-fuss console emulator for their TVs.
So far, few of the emulators that have made it to the iPhone have been ported to the Apple TV. But earlier this week, the streaming box got an official port of RetroArch, the sprawling collection of emulators that runs on everything from the PlayStation Portable to the Raspberry Pi. RetroArch could be sideloaded onto iOS and tvOS before this, but only using awkward workarounds that took a lot more work and know-how than downloading an app from the App Store.
The federal inmate charged in December with stabbing former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in an Arizona prison can represent himself in court after a judge agreed to a request to waive his right to legal representation, court documents show.
More than 5,000 Mercedes-Benz workers who build luxury SUVs in Alabama were eligible to vote on whether to join the UAW. Workers faced intense anti-union messaging from Mercedes in the run-up.
John Eastman, a former attorney for former president Donald Trump, pleaded not guilty on Friday to charges related to a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Arizona.
What you experience through your senses — sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch — can impact how healthy you are and how long you live, says neurobiologist Christi Gendron. She explores how environmental cues like temperature, light and even just the sight of death have influenced the lifespan of fruit flies, suggesting your everyday perceptions may have direct repercussions on your ability to live a long, healthy life.
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
Last week, I scoured the internet in search of a robotic dog. I wanted a belated birthday present for my aunt, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Studies suggest that having a companion animal can stave off some of the loneliness, anxiety, and agitation that come with Alzheimer’s. My aunt would love a real dog, but she can’t have one.
That’s how I discovered the Golden Pup from Joy for All. It cocks its head. It sports a jaunty red bandana. It barks when you talk. It wags when you touch it. It has a realistic heartbeat. And it’s just one of the many, many robots designed for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia.
This week on The Checkup, join me as I go down a rabbit hole. Let’s look at the prospect of using robots to change dementia care.
As robots go, Golden Pup is decidedly low tech. It retails for $140. For around $6,000 you can opt for Paro, a fluffy robotic baby seal developed in Japan, which can sense touch, light, sound, temperature, and posture. Its manufacturer says it develops its own character, remembering behaviors that led its owner to give it attention.
Golden Pup and Paro are available now. But researchers are working on much more sophisticated robots for people with cognitive disorders—devices that leverage AI to converse and play games. Researchers from Indiana University Bloomington are tweaking a commercially available robot system called QT to serve people with dementia and Alzheimer’s. The researchers’ two-foot-tall robot looks a little like a toddler in an astronaut suit. Its round white head holds a screen that displays two eyebrows, two eyes, and a mouth that together form a variety of expressions. The robot engages people in conversation, asking AI-generated questions to keep them talking.
The AI model they’re using isn’t perfect, and neither are the robot’s responses. In one awkward conversation, a study participant told the robot that she has a sister. “I’m sorry to hear that,” the robot responded. “How are you doing?”
But as large language models improve—which is happening already—so will the quality of the conversations. When the QT robot made that awkward comment, it was running Open AI’s GPT-3, which was released in 2020. The latest version of that model, GPT-4o, which was released this week, is faster and provides for more seamless conversations. You can interrupt the conversation, and the model will adjust.
The idea of using robots to keep dementia patients engaged and connected isn’t always an easy sell. Some people see it as an abdication of our social responsibilities. And then there are privacy concerns. The best robotic companions are personalized. They collect information about people’s lives, learn their likes and dislikes, and figure out when to approach them. That kind of data collection can be unnerving, not just for patients but also for medical staff. Lillian Hung, creator of the Innovation in Dementia care and Aging (IDEA) lab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, told one reporter about an incident that happened during a focus group at a care facility. She and her colleagues popped out for lunch. When they returned, they found that staff had unplugged the robot and placed a bag over its head. “They were worried it was secretly recording them,” she said.
On the other hand, robots have some advantages over humans in talking to people with dementia. Their attention doesn’t flag. They don’t get annoyed or angry when they have to repeat themselves. They can’t get stressed.
What’s more, there are increasing numbers of people with dementia, and too few people to care for them. According to the latest report from the Alzheimer’s Association, we’re going to need more than a million additional care workers to meet the needs of people living with dementia between 2021 and 2031. That is the largest gap between labor supply and demand for any single occupation in the United States.
Have you been in an understaffed or poorly staffed memory care facility? I have. Patients are often sedated to make them easier to deal with. They get strapped into wheelchairs and parked in hallways. We barely have enough care workers to take care of the physical needs of people with dementia, let alone provide them with social connection and an enriching environment.
“Caregiving is not just about tending to someone’s bodily concerns; it also means caring for the spirit,” writes Kat McGowan in this beautiful Wiredstory about her parents’ dementia and the promise of social robots. “The needs of adults with and without dementia are not so different: We all search for a sense of belonging, for meaning, for self-actualization.”
If robots can enrich the lives of people with dementia even in the smallest way, and if they can provide companionship where none exists, that’s a win.
“We are currently at an inflection point, where it is becoming relatively easy and inexpensive to develop and deploy [cognitively assistive robots] to deliver personalized interventions to people with dementia, and many companies are vying to capitalize on this trend,” write a team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego, in a 2021 article in Proceedings of We Robot. “However, it is important to carefully consider the ramifications.”
Many of the more advanced social robots may not be ready for prime time, but the low-tech Golden Pup is readily available. My aunt’s illness has been progressing rapidly, and she occasionally gets frustrated and agitated. I’m hoping that Golden Pup might provide a welcome (and calming) distraction. Maybe it will spark joy during a time that has been incredibly confusing and painful for my aunt and uncle. Or maybe not. Certainly a robotic pup isn’t for everyone. Golden Pup may not be a dog. But I’m hoping it can be a friendly companion.
Now read the rest of The Checkup
Read more from MIT Technology Review’s archive
Robots are cool, and with new advances in AI they might also finally be useful around the house, writes Melissa Heikkilä.
Social robots could help make personalized therapy more affordable and accessible to kids with autism. Karen Hao has the story.
Japan is already using robots to help with elder care, but in many cases they require as much work as they save. And reactions among the older people they’re meant to serve are mixed. James Wright wonders whether the robots are “a shiny, expensive distraction from tough choices about how we value people and allocate resources in our societies.”
From around the web
A tiny probe can work its way through arteries in the brain to help doctors spot clots and other problems. The new tool could help surgeons make diagnoses, decide on treatment strategies, and provide assurance that clots have been removed. (Stat)
Richard Slayman, the first recipient of a pig kidney transplant, has died, although the hospital that performed the transplant says the death doesn’t seem to be linked to the kidney. (Washington Post)
EcoHealth, the virus-hunting nonprofit at the center of covid lab-eak theories, has been banned from receiving federal funding. (NYT)
In a first, scientists report that they can translate brain signals into speech without any vocalization or mouth movements, at least for a handful of words. (Nature)
The country has been hit by decades of crises and catastrophe, but its culture continues to thrive across the diaspora. Here, Haitian musicians celebrate its ’sounds of freedom’
Even before March this year, when gun-toting gangs overran the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, dictatorships, poverty, health crises and earthquakes had defined the country in the eyes of global media. It passes for the archetypal failed state, a place where Unicef has declared that 3 million children urgently need humanitarian aid. Yet there is an alternative to this narrative of disaster and chaos: the beauty of Haitian culture. Music and visual art remain enduring symbols of hope.
Over the years, the population and its diaspora in North America have been extraordinarily creative. In the 80s, Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose father was Haitian, took the art scene by storm with his outre graffiti, otherworldly painting and barbed political commentary, while today Haitian-born artists Myrlande Constant and Frantz Zephirin are producing exhilarating canvases. Between the 1950s and 80s, musicians Nemours Jean-Baptiste, Coupé Cloué and Boukman Eksperyans excelled in genres such as compas, manba and rasin, which all have entrancing dance rhythms derived from Africa and provocative lyrics in the Creole language born of contact between French settlers and enslaved people.
Adaptation of hit comedy quiz will begin airing on CNN on Saturday nights to coincide with presidential election
Arch, ironic and understated, Have I Got News for You is the quintessential British comedy quiz, but its creators are hoping a US version of the show can translate its particular brand of political humour across the Atlantic.
A US adaptation of the show will be broadcast by CNN in the autumn, to coincide with the presidential election. It will hit screens on Saturday nights – part of a double-bill with Bill Maher’s Real Time.
It is taking fast fashion to ever faster and ever cheaper extremes, and making billions from it. Why is the whole world shopping at Shein? By Nicole Lipman
We are excited to announce updates to our vulnerability prioritization funnel, which will help you focus on vulnerabilities that pose a real danger to your business.
Adrian Coghill ordered to leave in response to UK expelling Kremlin’s attache to London for alleged spying
Russia is expelling Britain’s defence attache to Moscow in the latest diplomatic tit for tat, after the UK accused it of sponsoring espionage and hacking attacks against top British officials in a years-long campaign of “malign activity”.
The Russian foreign ministry said it had declared the British defence attache, Adrian Coghill, as “persona non grata. He must leave the territory of the Russian Federation within a week.”
Hannigan/Chamayou (Alpha) The superb projection of Hannigan’s voice and the rainbow of colours in Chamayou’s piano lay bare the sexual desire and religious fervour prevalent in Messiaen’s early works
Olivier Messiaen wrote just three large-scale works for voice and piano. The most substantial, Harawi, composed in 1945 as the first part of a trilogy of pieces built around the medieval legend of Tristan and Iseult, was the last of them, while the two cycles that Barbara Hannigan and Bertrand Chamayou have recorded are early works: Poèmes pour Mi was completed in 1937 while the less well known Chants de Terre et de Ciel followed the next year. Both have texts written by the composer himself, characteristically mixing religious imagery with personal references: the Poèmes were dedicated to Messiaen’s first wife, the violinist and composer Claire Delbos, while Chants celebrated the birth of the couple’s son Pascal.
Hannigan’s silvery, flexible sound may lack the sheer heft of the “dramatic soprano” that Messiaen specifies for both cycles, but the way in which she uses her voice and her superb projection of the French texts are more than adequate compensation. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a weightier voice bringing such beguiling, soft-edged intimacy to parts of each cycle as she does. Alongside her, Chamayou finds a rainbow of colours in Messiaen’s piano writing, and as a bonus they add the rarely heard La Mort du Nombre, a 10-minute cantata for soprano, tenor (Charles Sy), violin (Vilde Frang) and piano that Messiaen wrote in 1930. The text, again by the composer himself, depicts two souls expressing their sadness at being separated, the tenor urgent, anguished, the soprano patient and reassuring – the mingling of sexual desire and religious fervour that would be such a big part of Messiaen’s music for the next two decades.
Bridgewater Hall, Manchester Stephen Hough’s new, nostalgia-themed work enjoyed its European debut with Mark Elder and the Hallé very much on form in their final months together
Stephen Hough’s new piano concerto, first performed in January by the Utah Symphony, arrived in Europe with the composer as soloist, partnered by Mark Elder and the Hallé. The concerto’s subtitle, The World of Yesterday, borrowed from the memoir of the same title by Stefan Zweig, suggests an exploration of musical nostalgia, as Hough acknowledges in his programme note; he draws a parallel with the pianist-composers of the years between the two world wars, such as Bartók, Prokofiev and Rachmaninov, for whom their own concertos became, in Hough’s words, “a visiting card on the road”.
Hough hardly needs such a visiting card, and his neatly proportioned work, in three linked movements, is much more than a vehicle for his pianism. But it does look fondly backwards, though in ways that never seem derivative. The “white-note” orchestral opening might hint at the wide open spaces of 1930s Americana, but its themes are filtered through a much more acerbic harmonic palette in the hefty solo cadenza that follows. A set of variations on one of those themes, a wistful waltz (recalling a Bill Evans number, Hough suggests), carefully blends the extrovert and the intimate and provides the concerto’s centrepiece, before Hough allows himself the luxury of some virtuoso showing-off in the final tarantella.
Conservative party chair Richard Holden says Labour leader ‘doesn’t have courage or conviction to stick to a single pledge’
Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, is up now. He highlights the energy pledge.
4) Set up Great British Energy a publicly-owned clean power company, to cut bills for good and boost energy security, paid for by a windfall tax on oil and gas giants.
Sen. Bob Menendez abused his position as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to "put greed first," a federal prosecutor told jurors during opening statements in the senator's bribery trial.
RedBird IMI deal effectively killed by new legislation blocking foreign states from owning UK newspapers
The former CNN executive who fronted a failed bid for the Telegraph newspaper by a UAE-backed consortium has suggested the government was not willing to listen to assurances about editorial neutrality.
Jeff Zucker said there were figures in the UK who were “scared” of the £600m deal, which would have seen the Abu Dhabi-backed consortium, RedBird IMI, take control of the Telegraph and Spectator.
Broadcom's acquisition of VMware last year has led to widespread upheaval at the company, including layoffs, big changes to how it approaches software licensing, and general angst from customers and partners. Broadcom also discontinued the free-to-use version of VMware's vSphere Hypervisor/ESXi earlier this year, forcing home users to find alternatives.
Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro certainly aren't the only free-to-use virtualization products—VirtualBox has existed for years, and there are many indie projects that make use of Apple's virtualization frameworks for macOS. But VMware's products are a bit more polished and easier to learn than some of those alternatives, and VMware's file formats are also commonly used when redistributing virtual machines for retrocomputing purposes.
Exclusive: Judge accused Robert Courts of ‘mischaracterising evidence’ against Trudi Warner
The government’s most senior law officer is to appeal against a decision not to allow a contempt of court action against climate campaigner Trudi Warner for holding a placard on the rights of jurors outside a British court, the Guardian can reveal.
Mr Justice Saini ruled at the high court last month there was no basis to take action against Warner, 69, for holding up the sign informing jurors of their right to acquit a defendant based on their conscience. He said the government’s claim that her behaviour fell into the category of criminal contempt was “fanciful”.
Clean river campaigner says pollution poses threat as Labour MP calls for water industry to be taken into public ownership
A clean river campaigner has warned of a serious risk someone will die from swimming in English rivers and seas because of the level of E coli from water pollution.
Charles Watson of River Action, speaking on Wednesday as the bathing water season officially opened, said that with warm weather approaching and half-term in a week, thousands of children and families would be taking to rivers, lakes and seas. Most of these sites are not monitored for E coli, as they are not designated bathing sites.
We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.
This week, from 2023: Steve Albini was long synonymous with the indie underground, playing in revered bands and recording albums by the Pixies, PJ Harvey and Nirvana. He also often seemed determined to offend as many people as possible. What led him to reassess his past? By Jeremy Gordon
Russia, shunned from the world stage, and China, subject to new US tariffs, want to pivot further from the west
Having secured a mandate to extend his rule of Russia to three decades, Vladimir Putin has arrived in Beijing on a state visit to meet Xi Jinping intended to shore up his most important international relationship.
The two men toasted their “no-limits” friendship in February 2022 – meant as a counterweight to the global influence of the US. That partnership has increasingly come under pressure as the Biden administration sought to isolate Russia from its Chinese lifeline after the full-scale invasion in Ukraine, which began later the same month.
Lego Barad-dúr silently surveils a living room. [credit:
Lego ]
Here's something for any Lord of the Rings fan with a tall, narrow space available on their tchotchkes shelf: Lego has announced a $460, 5,471-piece rendition of Barad-dûr, which viewers of the films will recognize as "that giant black tower with the flaming eye on top of it."
Sauron, Base Master of Treachery, will keep his Eye on you from atop the tower, which will actually glow thanks to a built-in light brick. The tower includes a minifig of Sauron himself, plus the Mouth of Sauron, Gollum, and a handful of Orcs.
The Lego Barad-dûr set will launch on June 1 for Lego Insiders and June 4 for everybody else. If you buy it between June 1 and June 7, you'll also get the "Fell Beast" bonus set, with pose-able wings and a Nazgûl minifig. It doesn't seem as though this bonus set will be sold separately, making it much harder to buy the nine Nazgûl you would need to make your collection story-accurate.
The Canadian writer was known for her masterfully crafted short stories. Throughout her long career, she earned a number of prestigious awards including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.
What was supposed to be an overnight protest on Queen’s University’s campus Friday in regard to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict was still ongoing Monday morning. Read More
Ten years have passed since Heartbleed was first identified, but the security industry is still grappling with the question of branded vulnerabilities and naming vulnerabilities appropriately.
Do you keep the entire house at a permanent 30C, or are you a Bear Grylls wannabe with an ‘extreme survival’ approach to turning the heating on? There are many ways to heat our homes and lots of us are doing it totally wrong. Take our quiz and find out if you need to adopt a smarter approach to central heating
From heat pumps to insulation, solar panels and more, explore ways the government can support you at gov.uk/energy-efficient-home.
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction is a relatively new literary award given to women and nonbinary authors. This year's winner is V.V. Ganeshananthan for her book Brotherless Night.
Apple has released the latest updates for virtually all of its actively supported devices today. Most include a couple handfuls of security updates, some new features for Apple News+ subscribers, and something called Cross-Platform Tracking Protection for Bluetooth devices.
The iOS 17.5, iPadOS 17.5, macOS 4.5, watchOS 10.5, tvOS 17.5, and HomePod Software 17.5 updates are all available to download now.
Cross-Platform Tracking Protection notifications alert users "if a compatible Bluetooth tracker they do not own is moving with them, regardless of what operating system the device is paired with." Apple has already implemented protections to prevent AirTag stalking, and Cross-Platform Tracking Protection implements some of those same safeguards for devices paired to non-Apple phones.
The new 13-inch iPad Air with the Apple M2 processor inside. [credit:
Andrew Cunningham ]
The iPad Air has been a lot of things in the last decade-plus. In 2013 and 2014, the first iPad Airs were just The iPad, and the “Air” label simply denoted how much lighter and more streamlined they were than the initial 2010 iPad and 2011’s long-lived iPad 2. After that, the iPad Air 2 survived for years as an entry-level model, as Apple focused on introducing and building out the iPad Pro.
The Air disappeared for a while after that, but it returned in 2019 as an in-betweener model to bridge the gap between the $329 iPad (no longer called “Air,” despite reusing the first-gen Air design) and more-expensive and increasingly powerful iPad Pros. It definitely made sense to have a hardware offering to span the gap between the basic no-frills iPad and the iPad Pro, but pricing and specs could make things complicated. The main issue for the last couple of years has been the base Air's 64GB of storage—scanty enough that memory swapping doesn't even work on it— and the fact that stepping up to 256GB brought the Air too close to the price of the 11-inch iPad Pro.
Which brings us to the 2024 M2 iPad Air, now available in 11-inch and 13-inch models for $599 and $799, respectively. Apple solved the overlap problem this year partly by bumping the Air's base storage to a more usable 128GB and partly by making the 11-inch iPad Pro so much more expensive that it almost entirely eliminates any pricing overlap (only the 1TB 11-inch Air, at $1,099, is more expensive than the cheapest 11-inch iPad Pro).
After more than two years digitizing, packing and moving 17,000 items, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre was set to close Friday as the start of the venue’s transformation — demolition work — is slated to begin Monday. Read More
Enlarge/ One of many human-created objects destroyed in Apple's "Crush!" ad for the iPad Pro. (credit: Apple)
Earlier this week, Apple took the wraps off of a thoroughly leaked iPad Pro refresh with a 1 minute and 8 second ad spot wherein a gigantic hydraulic press comprehensively smushes a trumpet, an arcade cabinet, a record player, paint cans, a piano, a TV, sculptures, a bunch of emoji, and plenty of other tools that one might loosely categorize as "artistic implements."
At the end of the ad, the press lifts away to reveal a somewhat thinner, somewhat faster version of Apple's iPad Pro. The message of the ad, titled "Crush!" and still available via Apple's YouTube channel and CEO Tim Cook's Twitter account, is obvious: look at all of the things we've squeezed into this tablet!
"Just imagine all the things it'll be used to create," wrote Cook.
pMany of us will celebrate Mother’s Day over the weekend by remembering or being present with women who raised us, or with our families. But for the a href=https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024women.htmlmore than 190,000 women incarcerated in the United States this weekend/a, there will be no celebration./p
pClose to a href=https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2023/05/Incarcerated-Women-and-Girls-1.pdf60 percent/a of these women serving prison sentences were the primary caregiver of their minor children before sentencing. All too often, a prison sentence tears them from their family connections and contact with their children, while severing their children from a vital source of emotional and financial support. State women’s prisons are often located in rural areas, with limited modes of transportation, and families struggle to visit./p
pAs a result, families have very few in-person visits, and must rely on postal mail, or pay inflated prices for telephone calls and video contacts. Compounding the lack of connection, women in many state prisons cannot even hold in their hands and cherish a card or drawing sent by their children. Many prisons a href=https://slate.com/technology/2018/12/pennsylvania-prison-scanned-mail-smart-communications.htmlhave done away with real mail/a, and now use vendors to intercept, scan, and destroy all postal mail, delivering poor quality printouts of the original letter to the incarcerated recipients weeks later for a fee./p
pIn addition to women sentenced to prison, more than a href=https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/cj0519st.pdf#page=462.4 million women/a spend at least one day in jail each year, and a href=https://www.vera.org/downloads/publications/overlooked-women-and-jails-report-updated.pdf80 percent of them/a are mothers of children under the age of 18. And more than 60 percent of women in our nation’s jails are presumed innocent and awaiting trial, a href=https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-profit-shapes-bail-bond-systemjailed due to poverty and an inability to purchase their freedom/a by posting bail./p
pChildren with mothers incarcerated in local jails often fare no better than those whose mothers are in state prisons: Some jails have a class=Hyperlink SCXW228476086 BCX0 href=https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/us/jail-visits-ban-michigan-lawsuit.html target=_blank rel=noreferrer noopenercompletely banned in-person visitation/a to require all visits be done by paid video, not because of COVID, but to boost their bottom line. A a class=Hyperlink SCXW228476086 BCX0 href=https://www.prisonpolicy.org/visitation/report.html target=_blank rel=noreferrer noopener2015 study/a found that 74 percent of jails had banned in-person visits after putting video visits into place. Even when women are able to have in-person visits with their children, jail visits are often done through a plexiglass barrier. Women cannot hold, hug, touch, or kiss their children./p
pAlthough many more men are incarcerated than women in the U.S., women’s rate of incarceration has grown a href=https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/women_overtime.htmltwice that of men in the past 40 years/a. Since 2009, while the overall number of people in prisons and jails has decreased, a href=https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/women_overtime.htmlwomen have fared worse than men in 35 states/a. Women and families of color are disproportionately affected by this increase. Black and Native American / Alaska Native women are a href=http://chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/p22st.pdfincarcerated at double their share of the population of women in the United States. /a/p
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p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tabletThe ACLU works in courts, legislatures, and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and the.../p
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pWomen often become entangled with the criminal legal system due to trying to cope with poverty, limited access to child care, underemployment or unemployment, unstable housing, and physical and mental health challenges. They get thrown into a legal system that criminalizes survival behaviors such as selling drugs or sex work, and policies that charge and arrest persons for being present when crimes are committed by others, “aiding and abetting” others, or fighting back against domestic violence. Aa href=https://survivedandpunished.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/SP_ResearchAcrossWalls_FINAL-compressedfordigital.pdf study in California found/a that 93 percent of women incarcerated in state prison for a homicide of a partner were abused by the person they killed, and in two-thirds of those cases, the homicide occurred while attempting to protect themselves or their children./p
pIncarcerated women have high rates of histories of physical and sexual abuse, trauma, and mental health and substance use disorders. While incarcerated, a href=https://www.ktvu.com/news/u-s-senators-call-fci-dublin-transfer-of-women-appallingwomen are more likely than incarcerated men/a to face a href=https://thehill.com/opinion/4648109-feds-close-prison-dubbed-the-rape-club-but-accountability-is-needed/sexual abuse or harassment/a by correctional staff, and they experience serious psychological distress due to incarceration and the conditions in prisons. a href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/jensen-v-thornellTreatment in prisons/a or jails for mental health conditions, substance use disorders, and trauma is often nonexistent. Health care for physical medical conditions or pregnancy often is limited at best: Last year, through our a href=https://www.aclu.org/cases/jensen-v-thornelllawsuit/a, we learned the Arizona Department of Corrections was a href=https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2023/01/02/arizona-inducing-labor-of-pregnant-prisoners-against-their-will/69768038007/inducing the labor/a of pregnant incarcerated people against their will. This came after we a href=https://kjzz.org/content/951486/pregnant-women-arizona-prison-suffering-miscarriages-giving-birth-alonedocumented inadequate prenatal and postpartum care/a of women in Arizona prisons in 2019, including a woman with serious mental illness who gave birth alone, in the toilet of her cell, at a maximum custody unit./p
pSo what can we do to honor incarcerated women and families? First, we can financially support the incredible work of community-based bail funds that help free mothers and bring them home to their children and families. Second, we can support criminal legal reform policies to stop mass incarceration./p
pThe a href=https://www.nationalbailout.org/National Bail Out/a is a Black-led and Black-centered collective of organizers and advocates who are working to abolish pretrial detention and mass incarceration. They have coordinated with a variety of other groups, including a href=https://southernersonnewground.org/our-work/freefromfear/black-mamas-bail-out-action/Southerners on New Ground (SONG)/a, to create the tactical mass bail out of #FreeBlackMamas to acknowledge the reality that incarceration of women disproportionately affects Black women. They work with partner organizations to post bail for incarcerated women year-round, but especially before Mother’s Day. This year, instead of (or in addition to) sending flowers to your favorite mothers, you can donate to a href=https://www.nationalbailout.org/partnersNational Bail Out or the 18 Black-led organizations they are working with across the country/a to help #FreeBlackMamas./p
pWe also need to address the root causes of the incarceration of women in this country, which is often due to poverty. While drug or property offenses account for about half of the charges for which women are incarcerated, policies must also focus on reducing a href=https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article272572946.htmlso-called “violent” offenses/a that women commit often in response to violence and abuse./p
pWhen we incarcerate women, we are causing irreparable damage to them, their families, and all of our communities./p
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
The human brain is an engineering marvel: 86 billion neurons form some 100 trillion connections to create a network so complex that it is, ironically, mind boggling.
This week scientists published the highest-resolution map yet of one small piece of the brain, a tissue sample one cubic millimeter in size. The resulting data set comprised 1,400 terabytes. (If they were to reconstruct the entire human brain, the data set would be a full zettabyte. That’s a billion terabytes. That’s roughly a year’s worth of all the digital content in the world.)
This map is just one of many that have been in the news in recent years. (I wrote about another brain map last year.) So this week I thought we could walk through some of the ways researchers make these maps and how they hope to use them.
Scientists have been trying to map the brain for as long as they’ve been studying it. One of the most well-known brain maps came from German anatomist Korbinian Brodmann. In the early 1900s, he took sections of the brain that had been stained to highlight their structure and drew maps by hand, with 52 different areas divided according to how the neurons were organized. “He conjectured that they must do different things because the structure of their staining patterns are different,” says Michael Hawrylycz, a computational neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Updated versions of his maps are still used today.
“With modern technology, we’ve been able to bring a lot more power to the construction,” he says. And over the past couple of decades we’ve seen an explosion of large, richly funded mapping efforts.
BigBrain, which was released in 2013, is a 3D rendering of the brain of a single donor, a 65-year-old woman. To create the atlas, researchers sliced the brain into more than 7,000 sections, took detailed images of each one, and stitched the sections into a three-dimensional reconstruction.
In the Human Connectome Project, researchers scanned 1,200 volunteers in MRI machines to map structural and functional connections in the brain. “They were able to map out what regions were activated in the brain at different times under different activities,” Hawrylycz says.
This kind of noninvasive imaging can provide valuable data, but “Its resolution is extremely coarse,” he adds. “Voxels [think: a 3D pixel] are of the size of a millimeter to three millimeters.”
And there are other projects too. The Synchrotron for Neuroscience—an Asia Pacific Strategic Enterprise, a.k.a. “SYNAPSE,” aims tomap the connections of an entire human brain at a very fine-grain resolution using synchrotron x-ray microscopy. The EBRAINS human brain atlas contains information on anatomy, connectivity, and function.
The work I wrote about last year is part of the $3 billion federally funded Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, which launched in 2013. In this project, led by the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which has developed a number of brain atlases, researchers are working to develop a parts list detailing the vast array of cells in the human brain by sequencing single cells to look at gene expression. So far they’ve identified more than 3,000 types of brain cells, and they expect to find many more as they map more of the brain.
The draft map was based on brain tissue from just two donors. In the coming years, the team will add samples from hundreds more.
Mapping the cell types present in the brain seems like a straightforward task, but it’s not. The first stumbling block is deciding how to define a cell type. Seth Ament, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, likes to give his neuroscience graduate students a rundown of all the different ways brain cells can be defined: by their morphology, or by the way the cells fire, or by their activity during certain behaviors. But gene expression may be the Rosetta stone brain researchers have been looking for, he says: “If you look at cells from the perspective of just what genes are turned on in them, it corresponds almost one to one to all of those other kinds of properties of cells.” That’s the most remarkable discovery from all the cell atlases, he adds.
I have always assumed the point of all these atlases is to gain a better understanding of the brain. But Jeff Lichtman, a neuroscientist at Harvard University, doesn’t think “understanding” is the right word. He likens trying to understand the human brain to trying to understand New York City. It’s impossible. “There’s millions of things going on simultaneously, and everything is working, interacting, in different ways,” he says. “It’s too complicated.”
But as this latest paper shows, it is possible to describe the human brain in excruciating detail. “Having a satisfactory description means simply that if I look at a brain, I’m no longer surprised,” Lichtman says. That day is a long way off, though. The data Lichtman and his colleagues published this week was full of surprises—and many more are waiting to be uncovered.
Now read the rest of The Checkup
Another thing
The revolutionary AI tool AlphaFold, which predicts proteins’ structures on the basis of their genetic sequence, just got an upgrade, James O’Donnell reports. Now the tool can predict interactions between molecules.
And in 2017, we flagged the Human Cell Atlas project, which aims to categorize all the cells of the human body, as a breakthrough technology. That project is still underway.
All these big, costly efforts to map the brain haven’t exactly led to a breakthrough in our understanding of its function, writes Emily Mullin in this story from 2021.
From around the web
The Apple Watch’s atrial fibrillation (AFib) feature received FDA approval to track heart arrhythmias in clinical trials, making it the first digital health product to be qualified under the agency’s Medical Device Development Tools program. (Stat)
A CRISPR gene therapy improved vision in several people with an inherited form of blindness, according to an interim analysis of a small clinical trial to test the therapy. (CNN)
Long read: The covid vaccine, like all vaccines, can cause side effects. But many people who say they have been harmed by the vaccine feel that their injuries are being ignored. (NYT)
A team led by scientists from Harvard and Google has created a 3D, nanoscale-resolution map of a single cubic millimeter of the human brain. Although the map covers just a fraction of the organ—a whole brain is a million times larger—that piece contains roughly 57,000 cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and nearly 150 million synapses. It is currently the highest-resolution picture of the human brain ever created.
To make a map this finely detailed, the team had to cut the tissue sample into 5,000 slices and scan them with a high-speed electron microscope. Then they used a machine-learning model to help electronically stitch the slices back together and label the features. The raw data set alone took up 1.4 petabytes. “It’s probably the most computer-intensive work in all of neuroscience,” says Michael Hawrylycz, a computational neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, who was not involved in the research. “There is a Herculean amount of work involved.”
Many other brain atlases exist, but most provide much lower-resolution data. At the nanoscale, researchers can trace the brain’s wiring one neuron at a time to the synapses, the places where they connect. “To really understand how the human brain works, how it processes information, how it stores memories, we will ultimately need a map that’s at that resolution,” says Viren Jain, a senior research scientist at Google and coauthor on the paper, published in Science on May 9. The data set itself and a preprint version of this paper were released in 2021.
Brain atlases come in many forms. Some reveal how the cells are organized. Others cover gene expression. This one focuses on connections between cells, a field called “connectomics.” The outermost layer of the brain contains roughly 16 billion neurons that link up with each other to form trillions of connections. A single neuron might receive information from hundreds or even thousands of other neurons and send information to a similar number. That makes tracing these connections an exceedingly complex task, even in just a small piece of the brain..
To create this map, the team faced a number of hurdles. The first problem was finding a sample of brain tissue. The brain deteriorates quickly after death, so cadaver tissue doesn’t work. Instead, the team used a piece of tissue removed from a woman with epilepsy during brain surgery that was meant to help control her seizures.
Once the researchers had the sample, they had to carefully preserve it in resin so that it could be cut into slices, each about a thousandth the thickness of a human hair. Then they imaged the sections using a high-speed electron microscope designed specifically for this project.
Next came the computational challenge. “You have all of these wires traversing everywhere in three dimensions, making all kinds of different connections,” Jain says. The team at Google used a machine-learning model to stitch the slices back together, align each one with the next, color-code the wiring, and find the connections. This is harder than it might seem. “If you make a single mistake, then all of the connections attached to that wire are now incorrect,” Jain says.
“The ability to get this deep a reconstruction of any human brain sample is an important advance,” says Seth Ament, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. The map is “the closest to the ground truth that we can get right now.” But he also cautions that it’s a single brain specimen taken from a single individual.
The map, which is freely available at a web platform called Neuroglancer, is meant to be a resource other researchers can use to make their own discoveries. “Now anybody who’s interested in studying the human cortex in this level of detail can go into the data themselves. They can proofread certain structures to make sure everything is correct, and then publish their own findings,” Jain says. (The preprint has already been cited at least 136 times.)
The team has already identified some surprises. For example, some of the long tendrils that carry signals from one neuron to the next formed “whorls,” spots where they twirled around themselves. Axons typically form a single synapse to transmit information to the next cell. The team identified single axons that formed repeated connections—in some cases, 50 separate synapses. Why that might be isn’t yet clear, but the strong bonds could help facilitate very quick or strong reactions to certain stimuli, Jain says. “It’s a very simple finding about the organization of the human cortex,” he says. But “we didn’t know this before because we didn’t have maps at this resolution.”
The data set was full of surprises, says Jeff Lichtman, a neuroscientist at Harvard University who helped lead the research. “There were just so many things in it that were incompatible with what you would read in a textbook.” The researchers may not have explanations for what they’re seeing, but they have plenty of new questions: “That’s the way science moves forward.”
Correction: Due to a transcription error, a quote from Viren Jain referred to how the brain ‘exports’ memories. It has been updated to reflect that he was speaking of how the brain ‘stores’ memories.
Enlarge/ Many different Apple stickers from many different products and eras. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
As a noted sticker enthusiast, I’m always on the lookout for news at the intersection of stickers and technology. Which is why this report from 9to5Mac caught my eye: Apple is apparently starting to wind down its decades-long practice of including Apple logo stickers in the box with all of its products.
If you buy a new iPad Air or iPad Pro, you’ll be able to get some stickers if you ask the people at the Apple Store to include them (stores will get a “limited quantity” of stickers they can distribute on request). But the little sticker insert that has come with Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and other devices and accessories for as long as I can remember will stop being one of the default pack-ins.
Apple is apparently cutting down on its sticker distribution to help meet its environmental goals. The stickers are some of the last bits of plastic included in most modern Apple packaging; in recent years, even the plastic backing layer for the stickers has been replaced with wax paper instead. This happened around the same time that the inner layer of packaging wrapped around new Apple devices also shifted from plastic to paper and when plastic-sealed boxes gave way to tear-away paper adhesive strips.
Duncan Fremlin first met Stompin’ Tom Connors in 1990, when the singer of “Bud the Spud” and “Sudbury Saturday Night” decided to return to music after stepping away for 13 years. Read More
Israel reacted with a mix of concern and fury Thursday to President Joe Biden's warning that he would cut off weapons to the U.S. ally's military if it moves forward with a full-scale assault on Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where more than 1 million Palestinians are sheltering.
President Reagan expressing his disapproval of Israel's bombing of Beirut to the county's prime minister, Menachem Begin, from the White House on Aug. 12, 1982.
President Joe Biden said Wednesday the U.S. would not supply Israel with certain weapons and artillery shells if its military invades Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where more than 1 million people are sheltering.
When Apple announced the Apple M4 chip during its iPad Pro event yesterday, it mentioned that the chip came with "up to" four high-performance CPU cores.
Those short, easily missable words always mean that there's a lower-end version of the chip coming that doesn't include that many CPU cores, and the tech specs page for the new iPad Pro has the full details: iPad Pros with 256GB or 512GB of storage use a version of the M4 with three high-performance CPU cores and six smaller efficiency cores. Only the models with 1TB and 2TB of storage have an M4 with all four high-performance CPU cores enabled.
The 256GB and 512GB models also ship with 8GB of RAM, where the 1TB and 2TB models come with 16GB of memory installed. Though these changes are clearly spelled out on the Tech Specs page, the actual configuration page for the iPad Pros in Apple's online store doesn't give any indication that upgrading storage also upgrades your CPU and RAM.
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